Happy Open Access Week! (Or did “Science” Scare You Off?)

It’s International Open Access Week (10/21-27) and we’re already deep in celebration here at the library, but perhaps you’ve recently heard the term “open access” for another reason…

John Bohannon’s open access journals “sting” in Science has gotten a lot of people on campus talking about the subject. Did it scare you away from open access publishing? Certainly, Bohannon does demonstrate that there are some unscrupulous or sloppy open access publishers who did not conduct peer review. What he didn’t show was that junk science can be published in traditional, subscription journals too. In fact, Science itself has a pretty high number of retractions in its history according to a 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here’s the Science post about the PNAS article).

If something seems shady about a journal (open access or subscription) you are considering, ask your librarians (or the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team) to do some digging on the publisher.

Stay tuned for more posts this week on the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team, Tufts Open Course Ware, open data, and the White House open publication directive as we celebrate Open Access Week.